High-tech tours

By Christopher DeWolf

High-tech travelling is where it's at. These three tech-savvy tours – complete with cellphone, MP3 player, GPS or the Internet – let you scrape past the official veneer to discover the real story behind the sights.

iToor, therefore I Am (a traveller)

Taking it to the street, iToors offers podcast walking tours of New York, Santa Monica, Glasgow, London, Paris and Prague. Download the audio file, load it onto your MP3 player and off you go. Each iToor has a decidedly offbeat focus, letting you explore the cultural and historical underbellies of your destination.

Subversive Scribes, a London tour, leads you to a gloomy house on Soho's Dean Street where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, lived in squalor and lost three of his children to disease. Light Magic, a tour of Glasgow, guides arts and crafts aficionados through the life of the eccentric Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, famous for his Glasgow School of Art but somewhat less known for the symbols of the occult he allegedly incorporated into his buildings.

Yellow Arrow

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a local on take to take you to all of the truly best places? Good news: Yellow Arrow is a gateway to a worldwide network of invaluable local knowledge. Based in New York, Yellow Arrow uses yellow arrow-shaped stickers to point out the unassuming but interesting things that are often tucked away off the beaten path. Send a text message to the phone number and code on each arrow, and you’ll be texted back the significance of the place where you are standing. All of the arrows are catalogued online and accompanied by maps, photos and text, as well as the occasional video or audio file.

In Montreal, a yellow arrow draws your attention to a 10-metre-tall milk bottle, circa 1932, that once served as a water tower for the Guaranteed Pure Milk Company. In Mexico City, you'll see the pyramid logo that adorns the Tlatelolco subway station signage; each station is represented by a distinct symbol in order to make it accessible to the illiterate.

On its website, Yellow Arrow also features several themed, city-specific projects. The Secret New York offers an out-of-the-ordinary account of the city's five boroughs. In Flushing, Queens, you'll check out North America’s first Hindu temple, crafted in 1977 by Indian artisans using mostly imported materials. Another project, Capitol of Punk, explores Washington, D.C.’s role as the epicentre of America’s hardcore punk scene in the 1970s. In person, you can experience 10 text-walks with a downloadable map to guide you to sites like the South African Embassy, where punk rockers staged “percussion protests” against the country’s apartheid regime. Online, armchair travellers can experience the 10 tours either as streaming videos or as a video podcast, featuring some of punk’s most famous musicians, like Brendan Canty of Fugazi.

GPS Tours Canada

GyPSy Guide combines the help of a guided tour with the freedom of a road trip. Plug the small GPS device into your car stereo, and it will automatically play commentary along the way for over 3,500 points of interest in Western Canada. For example, when driving past Lake Minnewanka, named Water of the Spirits by First Nations people, you'll be regaled with tales of a mythical lake creature that was rumoured to pull poor souls out of their canoes to their death. Tours include the Canadian Rockies, the drive from Vancouver to Whistler and the city of Calgary. The GyPSy Guide also offers maps and satellite tracking to ensure that you will never get lost. Rentals are available at visitor information centres in Calgary, Banff, Jasper, Vancouver and Victoria.

(Christopher DeWolf is a writer and photographer who lives in Montreal. He is the editor of Urbanphoto, a collaborative blog dedicated to exploring cities around the world.)

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